Optimized Resource Allocation For Cascaded Communication Networks In Factory Automation

Cascaded communication systems consisting of multiple, hierarchically ordered wired and wireless subnetworks are of increasing interest for industrial applications to support reliability and flexibility simultaneously. Therefore, additionally arising latencies due to the cascading have to be minimized to meet the application's real-time requirements.Within this paper, we identify the resource allocation as promising approach to minimize such latencies. By reviewing basic allocation schemes of wired and wireless communication networks, we show their advantages and disadvantages with respect to the physical data transmission. Based on this comparison, we introduce methods to optimize the resource allocation of individual subnetworks. Moreover, we present an algorithm, which finds an optimized scheduling for the data transmissions in cascaded networks.